Page 50 - ACTL Journal_Sum24

In her letter -- as I said she could barely read and write -- you can feel the struggle that she went through to compose all of this. But from the letter we can see that she turned for help to all the people she thought might be able to do something. Almost certainly she went to see the sheriff. She probably went to the local postmaster, because that’s the representative of the federal government in this little world she lived in. But she went to all the parties who she thought might help her and no one would take any interest.
Desperate for help, Carrie Kinsey wrote her letter, put it in an envelope, bought a stamp, and wrote on the outside of it: to President Theodore Roosevelt, the White House...” It arrived on July 31, 1903.
“Mr. Prassident,” wrote Ms. Kinsey, struggling to overcome the illiteracy of her world. “They wont let me have him . . . He hase not don nothing for them to have him in chanes so I rite to you for your help.” Elsewhere in her letter, she essentially asked “is slavery legal again?”
Stop and think about that for a minute. In your own life - your brother or a child of yours, fourteen years old, has been stolen from you - and you know that he’s been sold and is being treated as a slave. You’ve seen the terrible mistreatment that he’s receiving. You’ve turned to every party you know of who might be able to help you and should help you and no one cares. Can you imagine the level of desperation that you have to reach to write a blind letter to the President of the United States? That was the state that Carrie Kinsey found herself in.
Her letter was forwarded by a White House mail secretary to the Department of Justice. There
it was slipped into a small rectan- gular folder and tagged with a reference number - 12007. No further action was ever recorded. Her letter lies today in the
National Archives.
Slavery by Another Name tells the story of how, after the Civil War, a new system of involuntary servitude was created, metastasizing through all southern society, what I call
“neoslavery,” with incredible force and brutality to circumscribe the lives of millions of African Americans in the rural South deep into the 20th century.
Its central figure is an obscure young Black man, Green Cottenham, who was arrested on a bogus charge of vagrancy on a cold morning in Shelby County Alabama in March of 1908. Five months later, on August 15, he was placed in a crude pine box and buried by convicts outside a forced labor coal mine near Birmingham, Alabama. He was one of hundreds of thousands of Black men in the South forced into the new kind of involuntary servitude created through perverse abuses of the judicial system and designed to supply labor to new industry and to intimidate African Americans away from their legal and political rights.
What happened to him—and to Carrie Kinsey’s brother— marked the climax of a cynical convergence of the worst aspects of white Americans in all regions of the country. A new national white consensus was coalescing everywhere against African Americans with astounding force and speed.
49
JOURNAL